looks like rain and sounds like thunder
by VictoriaJoan
Summary: Heartless monster, angel with a taste for rebellion, it's unclear what he is - but he loves her quite dearly, she knows.


I feel like I am too old for this - and also that maybe being thirteen again, for a second, isn't so bad.

* * *

**looks like rain and sounds like thunder**

_Heartless monster, angel with a taste for rebellion, it's unclear what he is - but he loves her quite dearly, she knows. _

She didn't mean to care about him, never intended to.

But darkness twisted around her and inside of her and drew her closer until she no longer saw what a monster he was, what a horrible world he had created.

Instead she saw the way he looked at her, and it felt like being lost and not caring.

* * *

She's a little drunk one night, a little angry, another vague voicemail from Tyler fueling her fire, and he has the nerve to sit down beside her like they're friends, after all of this. "Do you know how much pain you've caused this town?" she spits, and she thinks of Elena and Jeremy and Bonnie and she thinks of herself . "_Do you_?"

He looks away, bored. "Much, I suppose?" he guesses flatly.

She stares him, at the way he really doesn't care, at the way he can just sit here and be a person and be the furthest thing from a person there ever was, and she laughs a cold, hard, humorless laugh.

"Much," she nods, taking the drink the bartender had just placed in front of him, it glides perfectly and bitterly down her throat. "Much."

* * *

He's there again two days later, and he pays for her drink. She's more concerned with why _she's _there again two days later, because how many times can the same sorrows be drowned?

"Why even pay?" she wonders, and maybe she'll regret it but the drink is cool sliding down her burning throat.

"It'd be immoral to compel him, wouldn't it?" he reasons, and his eyes flicker to the bartender for a second, a half-second, and then they're back on her.

"Morality, huh?" she takes another sip of her honest drink, "Shoulda known."

* * *

The next time she sees him, she steers clear of questionable morality and instead occupies herself with more intellectual pursuits.

"Did you know Picasso?" she asks.

"Da Vinci?"

"Columbus?"

He takes slow sips, and his eyes fall over her like they're appraising fine art, like maybe she's a masterpiece he's never seen before, like maybe he wants to memorize every brushstroke, like they mean something. The corners of his lips curl when he says, "What you should be asking," - and he tilts his head towards her, they share a secret - "is if they knew me, love."

And she responds with a scoff and shot but before she leaves she admits, "I don't know if anyone has ever really known you at all."

* * *

"I don't know what you think this is," she tells him one day, when she feels feather-light fingertips ghost down her spine. "But you can't do that."

He sets down his drink, considers her carefully. Tilted head, narrowed eyes, thousand year old soul, he says, "I know exactly what this is."

* * *

He falls into step beside her as she walks to her car, and was he there the whole time?

"Where are you off to?" he asks, speaking in that way that speaks for itself.

"Home," she replies simply, the word turning to mist in the cold air.

The corner of his lips lift in a smirk and he lowers his voice, silky smooth. "Are you?"

* * *

She doesn't know why she gives in now, but it feels right.

How can _this _feel _right_?

She sighs into his lips because it doesn't matter anymore.

* * *

He lingers on every part of her, licks every drop of sweat. Doesn't give her the chance to pretend she's anywhere else.

Like she could.

(_Did you know-_

- she's on fire but his hands are cool as ice, gliding over her and worshipping every inch of skin -

_we have until the end of time?_)

* * *

When the morning light shines on what she's done, she doesn't mind.

She has an eternity to feel guilty. Procrastinating a little isn't going to hurt.

* * *

His hand slides over her waist, and she turns to face him.

He rolls on top of her, licks the corner of her lips and nope, procrastination doesn't hurt at all.

* * *

She wouldn't even allow herself to imagine what his lips felt like until that night.

Now every breath she takes tastes like him.

She never thought it'd be like this.

* * *

She's just stepped out of Elena's house when he pulls her by the arm, and they're behind the garage.

"Klaus," she breathes, and it's not relief but it's not fear. Her eyes flicker up to her friend's window instinctively - Elena has vampire senses now, this is hardly being clandestine - "A little risky, don't you think?" she whispers harshly, pushing him away with a shove to his shoulder - he humors her, as gentlemen do.

She thinks of the Salvatores and their near constant presence and wonders, just who is she trying to protect? while he shamelessly dips down and leaves her scarred where his lips meet the corner of her mouth.

"I'm not worried," he tells her quietly, and it's cool breath on her warm cheek, "or patient."

She doesn't think when he grins against her neck, she doesn't think at all.

* * *

"Please. Call me Nik."

This is when she realizes she's in trouble.

This is when she realizes she can't turn back.

This is when she laughs -

"Alright. Nik, then."

* * *

When he's not nearby she feels like she's underwater. Blurry sight, muffled sounds.

She can live without air but she still needs it somehow.

* * *

Her fingers tug unapologetically at his hair as he pushes her roughly against the doorframe, and he dips for the bruising, ravenous kiss they're both expecting, the horror and perfection they've become accustomed to and continue to crave -

but instead, they pause, their faces inches apart and yet miles. Inertia holds them in place, a magnetic force pulling and pushing in equal measure until it leaves them exactly where they are.

They can do nothing but look, both knowingly and without comprehension, at the eyes staring back at them, and they shallowly breathe the other's air as if it were their own. They forget about this moment, later, except they don't, not ever or at all.

* * *

Sometimes the moments they spend together don't feel tangible, like they're part of some foolish dream that doesn't have any reason, any strings that connect one person or thing to another.

The whole world is a lie and they're just swimming in it, an imaginary reality that no one could ever understand.

* * *

The conflict, the supernatural war they had become part of - it feels like it loses steam, slows down, stops with hardly anyone noticing.

She picks out a scarf, "This one?" and somehow this is what he'd rather be doing.

* * *

"Let me teach you about vision," he tells her. "Let me teach you about everything you never knew before."

She rolls onto her back and the silk sheets slip to accommodate her rather than tangle around her body. His eyes find hers hungrily, and it's like she can feel them melting right into her, getting lost between her skin and the sheets.

"I know vision," she says slowly, he hangs on every word - "I'm not a blank slate." It sounds like a warning.

He lifts her chin with his fingertips, and it makes her feel so young. She hates the air of childishness that he sometimes regards her with but as her body heats up, it's not with anger.

"Blank enough," he rasps, and when his lips are dry against her mouth, she takes it upon herself to moisten them.

* * *

Words like the kind needed to describe what they have don't exist.

And if they do, they shouldn't.

Her friends find out, as they always do, about her forbidden affair, her little trysts.

(Footsteps, and then, _"Caroline?"_

She pushes him away - "You need to leave-"

- but he just grins. "Why should I?"

Elena's shadow in the hall and, _"Oh, god. Oh god."_)

She does her best to defend both herself and her choices… and also, remarkably, him. That, unsurprisingly, was the last shovelful of dirt that dug her grave. Like somehow, a mindless cheerleader prone to easy seduction was forgivable, but a conscious inclination towards _him_? The heresy!

She leaves them in anger but it's shallow. A fleeting thought: if it came down to choosing between him and her friends, who would she stand by?

She doesn't allow herself to answer, but she does seek him out that night, and with her arms around his waist, she thinks she knows anyway.

* * *

He wraps his arms around her and swallows her whole.

She tries to cling to edges of sanity but it's just so easy to get lost in the way he says her name.

* * *

They fooled themselves into believing it was over for good (it will never be over, it's been raging for a thousand years). False sense of security, is it really necessary to point out that that is possibly the _oldest _trick in the book?

Her friends strike while she's with him - perhaps they weren't entirely expecting that (it'd be worse, she thinks, if they were) - but it doesn't make much of a difference. Damon's the one that holds her back, and she can't hear anything except her own voice. When they don't respond to her cries for them to stop, she can only call to him.

_Nik, _she repeats over and over, and when he realizes they've got him this time, and he slides almost entirely paralyzed down the wall he had pressed her against only hours before, his eyes find hers. There's a vivid fear in them - panic - but she can't help but feel it's not for his life, but for theirs.

Theirs?

She tastes his breath again, the day they could not move, and she knows no matter how long she lives she will never taste anything so bitter and so sweet again. This prompts what one may call an adrenaline rush, in humans. In vampires - tenfold.

She breaks free, Damon's grip breaking and probably his arm with it. She doesn't know what else to do except push Bonnie away - effectively stunning the witch briefly, if not knocking her out cold. Stefan has to release Klaus in attempt to restrain her, and luckily the hybrid is not so far gone as Caroline had begun to fear he was.

She swipes her hand through the symbols Bonnie had hastily traced on the wall in a thick, mysterious medium, and it seemed to both weaken the witch and strengthen Klaus. His arm slams Stefan into the wall, causing cracks to spiral out in all directions like the threads of a dark web, and in the one brief second they have, he tells her not to watch.

There is no time to stop him.

* * *

She'll probably never be okay again.

She doesn't mind because she doesn't even remember what okay is.

* * *

He did not kill Stefan, or anyone else on that day, and she is thankful for that. Despite the fact that they were so eager to end him, he spared all their lives. For her, perhaps. They don't speak of it.

They are of course unable to stay in Mystic Falls. He predicts it would be more comfortable a place to reside in about a hundred or so years, if she so desires to return.

She does not.

* * *

She loves him, she admits, to herself and to him, when he's being particularly affectionate.

She loves her friends and her home, too, unfortunately, and the loss weighs on her. She's strong, but it is quite heavy.

* * *

Blame is so easy, and she puts it on him.

_I'd grown fond of your smile, _he tells her quietly one day, standing in the doorframe of the bedroom she won't share with him. _Might even miss it._

She knows, because she knows him, that it was difficult for him to say. Somehow, though, it doesn't warm her, doesn't lift the corner of her lips. She is disgusted by him and herself.

She is no longer innocence and light, but just another extension of his madness, another destroyed part of him.

She's sure she'll fade away until there's nothing left.

He holds onto thin air; grasps it, clutches it for it for dear life.

* * *

They're traveling often, and she's growing tired of it. She tells him so.

He means to say he's sorry, but the word is entirely foreign to him and instead he snaps that if she dislikes it so much, she can go back to Virginia alone, without him, he doesn't care.

Her body feels very cold, instantly, and she nauseous with anger and a distinct sadness. Loneliness.

Maybe I will, she tells him, and he doesn't believe her but he worries all the same.

When he worries, she finds out, he occasionally kills people.

* * *

It was a young girl; blonde, with a quiet prettiness that faded to a whisper when her eyes glazed over. Cold and silent, both her and that night.

* * *

Next time Caroline gets on a train, it is by herself.

* * *

She finds, however, she has no place to go.

When she finds him again he doesn't greet her with open arms, just as she doesn't not rush into them. She missed him but she did not miss the crushing despair she felt with him.

They're together as they're sure they're supposed to be, but they aren't what they were, and neither of them are entirely fond of what they are. It seems better, though, than being nothing at all.

* * *

The next time he kills someone, she forgets to be angry about it.

Next time, she promises herself, next time I'll raise hell.

* * *

They're bruised and mangled and glorious.

While he licks the blood off her skin she draws more of his, teeth fine and sharp and deep in his shoulder. They shudder in pain and pleasure, and it doesn't matter whose it is, because they can't tell anyway.

* * *

The kindness he used to dig out of himself seems now buried forever - she can't access it, and she doesn't try. It seems, though, she's learned a trick or two.

(No need to raise hell, she figures, this is it.)

He breaks her every day and she's the only one who can rip him to pieces with one word.

(_This is love._)

They love each other until it's the only thing they know.

* * *

She never sleeps with anyone else but she does get close -

He doesn't like that so much, and she revels in it.

(_who is this anyway? his hands feels so strange and she wants to go home-)_

Seems the only way left to torture herself is to torture him.

* * *

He catches himself thinking with blackened amusement, she has become as cruel as him in too many ways. Did he cast her off or did she lose herself somewhere along the way? Right now, she is just a stranger beside him. He regrets it, often, when he allows himself to notice.

But she will always come back to him.

* * *

They're in Paris living rather extravagantly and far from under the radar when the darkness suddenly leaves her. Sinner though he is, he is also possibly the most angelic creature she has ever seen.

In front of their bedroom window, the morning light has silhouetted him, except for the bits of sun that reflect on the ends of his hair, the mirrors in his eyes, and the fairness of his skin. As she blinks away sleep, he turns to her with a pleasant smile - concerned, though, it's possible.

Her heart breaks in the most magnificent of ways, and she glides to him gracefully. She puts her arms around him and he reciprocates with a rare tenderness reserved for only moments such as these, and she senses, unbelievably, an air of relief about him.

Something terrible is washed away, in that moment, and it seems he can pull her closer for the lack of it.

* * *

Heartless monster, angel with a taste for rebellion, it's unclear what he is - but he loves her quite dearly, she knows.


End file.
